Publications Based on SOEP Data: SOEPlit

Public Transfers to the Poor: Is really Europe more generous than the United States?

The Returns to Personality Traits across the Wage Distribution

This paper investigates heterogeneous wage effects of non-cognitive skills across the wage distribution. I develop a model of wage determination under uncertainty with respect to individual productivity based on three components (minimum wages, productivity premiums, bargaining premiums). Based on this model, I expect (i) a larger importance and (ii) larger effects of non-cognitive skills for high-wage ...

Can Personality Traits Explain Glass Ceilings?

This paper investigates whether personality traits can explain glass ceilings (increasing gender wage gaps across the wage distribution). Using longitudinal survey data from Germany, the UK, and Australia, I combine unconditional quantile regressions with wage gap decompositions to identify the effect of personality traits on wage gaps. The results suggest that the impact of personality traits on wage ...

Employment Effects of Payroll Tax Subsidies

This paper exploits several reforms of wage subsidies in the framework of the German Minijob program to investigate substitution and complementarity relationships between subsidized and non-subsidized labor demand. We apply an instrumental variables approach and use administrative data on German establishments for the period 1999–2014. Particularly in small establishments (0–9 employees), subsidized ...

The impact of the abolition of compulsory service on life satisfaction

Life satisfaction is arguably the ultimate goal of individual actions. We use the abolition of compulsory military and civil service in 2011 in Germany as a natural experiment to identify effects of institutionalized career disruptions on life satisfaction. We expect the effect to differ between young men according to their current situation in the transition into the labor market. Tracing back their ...

Minority Salience and Political Extremism

This paper studies electoral effects of exposure to religious minorities in the context of Muslim communities in Germany. Using unique data on mosques' construction and election results across municipalities over the period 1980-2013, we find that the presence of a mosque increases political extremism. To establish causality, we exploit arguably exogenous variation in the distance of the election ...

From Green Users to Green Voters

We study the effect of the diffusion of photovoltaic (PV) systems on the fraction of votes obtained by the German Green Party in federal elections. Using both regional and household survey data, we show that households that adopted PV systems became more supportive of the Green Party. We estimate that the adoption of domestic PV systems led to 25 percent of the increment in green votes between 1998 ...

Commission Staff Working Paper "Draft Joint Inclusion Report" - Statistical Annex (COM(2003)773 final)

Noncognitive Skills, Internet Use and Educational Dropout

Using data from the German Socio-Economic Panel for the years 2000 to 2006 we analyze the determinants and labor market effects of educational dropout. In addition to classical variables like family background and occupation, we examine noncognitive skills and Internet use. Noncognitive skills and Internet availability at home are negatively associated with the probability of becoming an educational ...

Noncognitive Skills, School Achievements and Educational Dropout

We analyse the determinants of dropout from secondary and vocational education in Germany using data from the Socio-Economic Panel from 2000 to 2007. In addition to the role of classical variables like family background and school achievements, we examine the effect of noncognitive skills. Both, better school grades and higher noncognitive skills reduce the risk to become an educational dropout. The ...